Tripping the light mediocre with Alien Legion: Piecemaker

Space opera is supposed to be grand—its scope, its characters, its plotlines.

Many of us have enjoyed the sweeping drama of Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, and Battlestar Galactica. Regardless of media—movies, video games, cartoons, comic books—these franchises all successfully encapsulate us within worlds dark, mysterious, and intriguing. The worlds are big; the stories, expansive; the characters, larger than life.

Alien Legion: Piecemaker yearns to be space opera. It attempts to be, but cannot be; rather, it descends irrevocably into a prosaic redundancy from the very first panel.

I can’t completely fault the writing or the artwork—scripter Chuck Dixon and penciller Larry Stroman, both of whom are stalwarts in the business, don’t necessarily make a bad product. In fact, taken as straightforward illustrated fiction, Piecemaker isn’t too terribly displeasing—just a little dated.

No, the product isn’t awful, taken out of context. It is indicative of the generally pervasive style of late-80s, early 90s comic books—sharp lines, bodies in dynamic tension, and an increased psychological awareness.

But as grandiose, all-encompassing space opera, which this series quite obviously aspires to, the narration and the renderings simply don’t measure up.

It is indeed difficult to criticize industry legends like Dixon and Stroman, but the shortcomings of this series allow for naught else. Dixon’s words, though tough and terse and at times very engaging, fail to convey a loftier sense of time and place—a must-have for successful science fiction comics. Stroman’s artwork, with which I have fewer problems, is more a product of the times than a unique realization—but again, it simply doesn’t measure up.

Experience Piecemaker for what it is—an at-times enjoyable story that teases something bigger, something grander, but that ultimately does not satisfy arousals of its own invention.